DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

It’s nearly Christmas!!

We are so glad that we made the last minute decision not to go to NYC over Christmas (as previously planned) since apparently we would have spent days in the airport this week, rather than going where we wanted to.

Went to Liverpool yesterday to shop with  Sam the Man and got a few last minute bits and bobs including the book of the website ‘PostSecret’. Howemad is that? To buy a book of a website. Anyway I did.

But I have to go now … as TT is standing by the door with his coat on ready to drive to the outlaws …. oh well.

Happy Christmas and see you in a few days.

My son uses the Internet for three things:

1. To use MSN with his friends. They all have mad names… he has ‘Knowledge speaks, wisdom listens’ and he used to have ‘there is no I in team, but if you look closely there is a me’.
2. To download games and play them.
3. To find jokey web sites.

Today he showed me these two sites:

1. A visual joke - with a cross cultural feel about it. It is called ‘Uncomfortable restrooms’.
2. This video which is a spoof of ‘Mortal Kombat’ a video game.

He used stumbleupon to find the sites.

If you have never stumbled online then you really ought to as it is a great way of browsing - you tell the search engine the kinds of site you like and it finds them for you. Try it.
Litrate told me about it and I have been having fun with it ever since.

So different people use the web for different things and my son and his friends mainly use it for fun and laughs. they tell each other new web sites to look up.

Really my son should be looking up info about where to go to university. But in fact I think he cannot believe he is old enough (neither can I).

Anyway, I found this on the web (hahahaha) …. hope you’re not scared of spiders:

Look what I found in my kitchen:

Makes you want to get out the disinfectant doesn’t it?
It never ceases to make me wonder what there is in front of you, but which can only be revealed by sophisticated technology.

I have been very house and family oriented in the last few weeks - I have found it hard at least t think about work matters. Probably even resistant….

But it was BRILLIANT to see people discussing on my blog on the last post. Very exciting indeed to read contributions even from people who have not spoken to me before. (You NEVER know who reads and does not comment. Well that’s not true, sometimes people tell you and site meters tell you a bit. But it is always a surprise to ME.) The funny thing is, that on this global stage , the people who commented are all local. I know who they all are - even though I have not met them all. I am very struck by this; the idea of SEEING THE LOCAL ARENA ON THE GLOBAL STAGE. Local people talking together, in front of witnesses, in front of a potentially global audience. I am thinking a lot about this and am in the middle of writing THREE papers one of which will expand on this idea of LOCAL/GLOBAL identity performance.
(Sorry re caps. I am not shouting.)

Anyhoo.
Very wonderful to have Peter and Sheila commenting on my last post and how welcome to see that Michele and Colin are generously sharing the draft of their updated New Literacies text online.

Peter, in one of his comments quotes that in their draft of Chapter 3 they argue describe literacy as:
‘socially recognized ways of generating, communicating and negotiating meaningful content through the medium of encoded texts within contexts of participation in Discourses ….’

I do think still that the texts should be encoded inletters to be part of literacy; but would want to still insist that a text can be far more than just lettered encoding. Thus in order to understand some texts, one’s literacy skills needs to account for the role of other modes such as images, sound etc. But I think that an image and no written words does not need the skills of literacy in order to be interpreted in some way. I think that images ARE however, complex texts and that we learn to read them in different ways. Crucially, one picture can be read by people who speak a million different languages from each other. (I agree of course that the image may be read in many ways and that cultural conventions (etc.) may impact on readings) The same could not be said of a text that is only encoded in written words.

Sheila mentions that many librarians dislike the term literacy because the converse is ‘illiteracy’. I also really dislike deficit models and would not be inclined to use such a term. It is as if ‘literate’ is the default position and that to not be able to de-code lettered texts is some kind of personal deficiency. Anyway all fascinating stuff.

Tomorrow I will be blogging about urban renewal, urban re-development, gentrification and the like - with reference to New York; Sheffield and possibly …. BERLIN.

Meet my son.

In relaxed mode.

One purpose might be political resistance. See here - and please watch carefully. You won’t regret it.

Made by Judith Supine some of whose work I have already photographed:

When I was in NYC I spoke to some people who are street artists and asked about their motivations. They said that different artists have many different reasons for wanting to put their work up in the street. I was fascinated by some of these reasons and find some of them really persuasive. I understand the responses as the following:

1. It is a way of bringing Art into the open; out of the galleries and amongst people. Outside from behind closed doors. A move away from elitism.
2. As a way of finding a voice; expression to ‘reply’ to imposed institutionalised messages ; a reply to capitalism- ‘they have their advertising on walls and everywhere. We do this on walls.’
3. A way of enacting political resistance;
4. A way of bringing different messages to people. Showing ‘other ways of seeing’ - i.e. other than the conventional;
5. A way to brighten up run down areas;
6. A way of changing the cultural landscape;
7. To make people laugh;
8. To gain attention for artists who have not yet made it in the mainstream artworld;
9. A way for mainstream artists to do something dufferent from what people are paying for;
10.It is a buzz, kudos even, to have your work recognised and talked about ‘on the street’ by groups slightly ‘on the edge’;
11. Artists who HAVE ‘made it’ conventionally, might want a different audience and a different ‘canvas’;
12. It is exciting, knowing that it has to be done surreptitiously avoiding ‘the eyes of the law’;

I now see street art very differently and as much more significant and profound than I used to do. I actually find it exciting now.

I am going to write something for a journal about representations of domesticity and the everyday on Flickr - which will feed into a paper I hope to present at a conference next January.

The abstract I sent off is this:

So that is what I want to present about for the conference but I want to write a fuller paper for a journal. Here are a few examples of the kind of thing I am interested in:

1. Every day aspects of life dignified, or made arty here. This is a kind of home as museum approach. Cultural studies stuff. This is in fact from ‘The New Domesticity group’ which describes itself like this:
   

   Domestic life has changed drastically in the past 50 years. What does your domestic life look like? Sewing, cooking, houseplants, crafts, aprons, I’d love to see photos of anything that fits into your domestic life. My hope is
   to showcase a younger generation\’s style and shape of domesticity.

2. Another example of life as art is here and I notice that this photo is also in the set up shots/not quite a still life pool as well as the ‘everyday life pool’. I love this kind of example which asks people to share in their life, with a descriptions saying, ‘this is not about the photography but the content (apple pie).
3. In the kitchen allows people to show off their cooking a bit or again there is a kind of museum/cultural studies approach. And I love this which is also in the ‘experimental’ group. By looking at the cross sections of groups that people put their photos in, you get an idea of the intention behind the photo. Similarly the group: ‘Domesticity: artful photos from around the house’ concentrates on things looking good. Very self conscious presentations of identity in the images like this washing up one. or the pegs.
4. And here is a really interesting glimpse into habitual ways of living and cooking (with a bowl resting on a cheese grater.) Note the sets this photo is in - it is in one to do wth ‘family’ and one to do with travel. Here the associations run through strongly with family, holiday and food. I feel like this one is a bit less like a ‘good house keepings’ photo.
5. I love this one which gives me ideas of what to get for dinner. Here is a delicious meal. A million genre of cookbook and magazine can be seen here.
6. An insight into life alone from the apartment life group. There’s a whole load of stuff to do with food issues again resonating here.
7. Hapakorean has been a contact of mine for a long ,long time and I saw the toddler in this photo from ultrasound shots even before he was born. HK documents the lives of her kids in detail and has just started enjoying vimeo. Here she has a movie of her son feeding his grandma ‘numnums.’ Just an episode of a few minutes showing the great American dream; the ideal family here with beautiful children and home. In addition I have traced through the story of how HK met her sister for the first time through Myspace. A lot revealed in these lives here through Flickr and HK has quite a following. Completely fascinating all this stuff as life moves seemlessly through the wrinkled binaries of life online and offline. (HK went to a Flickr meet a short while ago. )
8. Of course festivals like Christmas, weddings and Mother’s day are all excellent areas for me to look at in terms of representations of the domestic. So far a quick glimpse shws me they display things carefully. Apart from this exceptional photo of a ‘divorced grandparents’ domestic’.
9. And so is ‘what’s in my cupboard?‘ , ‘what’s in your bag?’ , ‘inside your drawers’, ‘deskspace‘, fridge and so on.
10. I want of course to also look at representations of family other than the type HK has shown - which are really quite traditional despite the new medium. I find this a brave image - showing a choild looking pretty uncared for - but I am sure this is not so, it is just the presentation has not been ‘cleaned up.’
11. I love the groups which try to emulate particular photographers. So this photo of a Dad and uncle (twin brothers) is in the Diane Arbus group. So the display is mediated through what is known about a photographer.
12. This one is presented like a social history display in a museum again, using artefcats of identity to represent something of character and time.
13. And also I want to look at the comments people are making, since this is often at least as revealing as the photo and more stuff is shown of the domestic through the comments quite often.

Lots of data huh? Whoever said that blogs were a waste of time?? I am finding a structure for this paper I think. And some questions.

I am wondering as I am looking at these photos whether the images themselves break down any boundaries? Are they pretty stereotypical of other photos we see in magazines? Family photos? Are we presenting family and domestic life in new ways? Or are the photos the same as they ever were? (Just more of them?) … while the nature of Flickr is allowing new conversations and new insights into our lives? Hmm those are things I will think about. Maybe it is the community and the talk around the photos that are bringing in the new?

Shall I submit this article to Visual Communication or somewhere else?

p>When I was a kid my Mum and Dad used to sometimes have ‘visitors’ for tea on a Sunday. Sundays were actually VERY boring when I was a kid - there was nothing to do, EVER.

This was OF COURSE pre everything. No tv on in the day (that started in about 1981 in the UK I think); no Internet of course; we did not even have a tape recorder till I was twelve (and then it ran on batteries that my Mum and Dad could not afford to replace).

My sister Jane had a record player which we played 45s on - Blackberry Way by The Move was Jane’s first single. Mine was Crackling Rosie by Neil Diamond (don’t know how I can admit that.)

Anyway it was the olden days OK? So when we had visitors my Mum would cook cakes from Good Housekeepings Cookery book - maybe cheese straws, maybe butterfly cakes; maybe date and walnut cake.

( I now have my own copy of Good Housekeepings - bought off e-bay. It’s fab.)

And we always had to Look Nice. So after Sunday dinner, ( a proper roast - I always hid the meat in my serviette and then chucked it in the coal bunker immediately afterwards), we had to go upstairs and get changed with clean clothes on.

Weird, huh? Seems so OLD.

Then the visitors would arrive and we had to go downstairs for a while to be polite. But it was always boring so we would usually go back upstairs, play, and then come down for tea - sandwiches and cake. Sometimes we sat in a line on the settee and someone (usually if Stan came, with his ‘proper’ camera), would take our photograph. This would appear in a frame later if we were really unlucky.

But anyway they always did this boring kind of talk as if they were on a special conversation display. And it was called ‘being polite’ I think. You had to act like a proper family which was weird as we already were a proper family. What reminded me of this was when I read about Vygotsky who had observed two little girls who were sisters and they said to each other ‘Let’s play sisters’.

Fantastic.

I knew what those little girls meant. And I felt like when the visitors came, my whole family played families. And it was as if we were in a pretend house with special visitor food. And we had to wear itchy clothes.

There is something in here about the relationships between space, language and identity. And about how there is a push-pull relationship amongst them all; they all influence each other so that you change in the space, or the space can change, and you change your language to change the space, but the space changes your language. And you end up being like a visitor in your own house.